San Diego finally deleted its 1988 bathhouse law

via PinkNews and NBC San Diego

Somewhere in Council President Joe LaCava's office, a staffer was reading the San Diego Municipal Code, which is a sentence that should come with hazard pay. In Chapter 4, Article 2, Division 4 they found a 1988 ordinance, amended in 1991, written to regulate bathhouses so that gay and bisexual men would stop having sex in them. It required operators not to "encourage, facilitate and/or knowingly allow" anything that risked HIV transmission. Nobody had enforced it in years. It was still the law.

repealed unanimously

On Tuesday, September 1, the City Council repealed it unanimously.

LaCava did not pretend the vote was about enforcement. "This language does not reflect who we are as a city," he said. "It is an outdated and offensive perspective." Repealing it, he added, was "a smart signal of how far we have come as a society." Councilman Raul Campillo, whose uncle died of AIDS in 1992, thanked him for bringing it forward.

why the law existed

The numbers behind the original panic: when the ordinance passed in April 1988, more than 700 San Diegans had been diagnosed with HIV or AIDS and half of them were already dead. The city has since lost roughly 10,000 people to the disease. That grief was real. The law was still wrong, and the county's own public health lead says so. Patrick Loose, who runs the HIV, STD and Hepatitis Branch, told the council that gay and bisexual men had already changed their behavior before the ordinance existed, and that grassroots LGBTQ organizations doing judgment-free education did far more than any code section ever did.

Oxean "Eddie" Rey, who publishes LGBTQ San Diego News, made the point the ordinance never could: "When this was added to the code, these facilities were comparable to a luxury spa, not a shady, dangerous stereotype."

San Diego is not alone in the cleanup. San Francisco repealed its bathhouse rules in 2024. Minneapolis did it in June. New York City lawmakers are trying now. If your city still has one of these on the books, it is probably in a division nobody has read since the first Bush administration. Somebody should read it.